


Sixth of June

by Koeji



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Abortion mention, F/M, Gen, happy birthday ocelot, some very soft knife guro stuff at the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-07
Updated: 2017-06-07
Packaged: 2018-11-10 02:01:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11117556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Koeji/pseuds/Koeji
Summary: The Sorrow doesn't tell her about the sixth of June, 1944.





	Sixth of June

**Author's Note:**

> Hey what's up I heard it was Ocelot's birthday so I whipped up a story about his actual birth real quick (read: Ocelot's birthday is yet another opportunity for me to talk about how great The Boss is)

On a cold morning in June, far from the beach, they hear the quiet thunder of boots on the sand. The helicopters shrink like distant flies in the sky, pushed and pulled along the wind's currents like balloons, coming and going, much like those below. There are snakes in the grass here, waiting in tall reeds, far from the roaring masses. They are waiting for men to die.

When the men begin to die, the snakes know how to move. One among them conversed with the departed. In death, their enemies are always surprisingly willing conversationalists; death seems to erase all allegiances. The man and the woman have together debated how much of this postmortem defection is made from bitterness as their bodies chill and harden on the beaches of Normandy and elsewhere. Like most of their debates, they do not emerge with an answer.

The man charts the words of the dead in despair. The sky is gray and blackening with powder and soot and their billowing dark excesses. He tells the snakes how to move, where they can go. He reads the lines of the universe as the souls he confers with fade into its trenches. The day is a good one. The day is a joy. The day is everything anyone but the two of them could hope for.

“We're moving out,” says his joy.

“I'll be right behind you,” says her sorrow. “Be careful.”

“I will.”

“Be careful,” he says again, to her and to the boy inside of her.

She looks into his eyes, careful not to touch him. He is careful not to tell her. The snakes take to the earth and skies.

 

The first time they meet, she doesn’t ask him to read her future.

He couldn’t, even if she wanted him to; it isn’t how his foresight works. Images and sensations come to him in rare, unbidden flashes; he sees only what the universe wants him to see. He cannot and will not ask anything more of it. Most people he meets who know of his ability don’t ask him at first, either, but eventually come to him in nights, in civilians’ clothing, desperate for answers he can’t provide. He is better acquainted with death than the future.

His joy never asks. “I’m here if you need to get it off your chest,” she tells him, in the days past when she was everyone’s joy. “But if you foresee anything bad happening to the other Cobras, don’t burden them with it. It will only distract them from the present.”

“Even if I know a way to avoid it?” he asks.

“If there is a way to avoid it, they’ll find it,” she says. 

He will remember this as the moment she entered his stage, face halved by moonlight, trusting everything and everyone over herself. It is often the smallest of moments that assure us of our love.

He doesn’t tell her how he has already seen the bridge above the cold waters of Tselinoyarsk, his own bones worn smooth by the currents along the shore.

He doesn’t tell her about the sixth of June, 1944.

 

He knows their son will live. He will be a man of fortitude, inscrutable, like his mother. Longing too sweetly for the dead, like his father. This he can tell from flashes of metaphor in his mind, the guide of the universe holding shells and fragments of his son before his eyes.

This knowledge does little to soothe his worries when his joy is first with child. She asks him to walk with her, and tells him as they stand side by side. She has always been more comfortable in the wild.

“Would you be angry,” she asks, “if I ended it?”

He shakes his head. He can’t be angry, he says. Not with the stakes riding on them—on her. Ever Atlas-like, bearing the world on her shoulders. He couldn’t ask her to bear a child as well.

“I’ll be a mother one day,” she says. “On my own terms.”

She says it like a promise, and he believes in her more than any future he’s ever seen. So when she insists on doing it alone, he waits, thinks of the thick black lozenges in her throat. Women have a brand of battlefield medicine all their own. His joy is more fortunate than most of the women the pills were made for. As always, The Sorrow awaits death.

Smiling, she returns, bloodless. The pills press into his palm. She curls her fingers around his and holds them tight.

“You would see its ghost around me,” she says.

 

On the sixth of June in 1944, his joy wishes for a ghost. A ghost would be proof that something had lived inside her. Instead the skies are gray over Normandy and the woman’s blood tells only of loss. They want her to know what they did to her. They carve up to her heart. The scar rips through her body like a fissure.

Outside the med tent, the cries of soldiers in pain and glory fill the night. The other Cobras wait with them. They don’t celebrate. They sit and wait for The Boss to rise again. They leave her with the one she loves.

She fingers each stitch knitting her chest together, tight and sticky with blood down to her womb. The tent and its lights and furnishings take new shapes for her. She’s never seen this world before.

The two of them sit in silence as her body betrays each of her orders. These are chains, the man realizes; the scar on her chest is a snake and a chain to everything she is and will be.

For the first time, his joy asks him to see for her. She asks if the men and women who gave her this snake killed their child. But The Sorrow does not see him among the dead.

His joy looks up at the sloping roof of the tent. “It did exist. Didn’t it?” she murmurs.

“A boy,” says The Sorrow.

“A boy,” she repeats, blinking slowly. “Our son.”

The man reaches for her hand. He tells himself to forget each tear. They are both grateful for the rising cadence of gaiety outside the tent.

 

Beneath Normandy’s starlight, The Joy and The Sorrow, hand in hand, over glinting amber bottles and huffs of dying flame, head toward the water. Their camp borders only a small inlet of the ocean, where the currents lap at the abandoned dead. The man speaks with each of them in turn; they are cruel and kind, fearful and not. Their cut-paper bodies circle the moon and look with pity on his joy’s bloody breast. He recalls being young, the cries and regrets of the dead overtaking his senses, consciousness set adrift in the endless sea. Now he can look up on them, tell himself apart from them. Much like himself, the dead are quieted by her touch.

The stars float among the clouds, upon the water, and he wishes he could take on her sadness as he does for the dead. Her eyes are dry now, but red and tired. She blinks against the night air.

“The moon looks down on all of us equally,” she says. “On him too.”

“Will you go after them?”

His joy doesn’t answer. She trails her fingers over the thin black stitches and begins to tug. The spirits of the dead gather and watch her bloodied fingers, crisscrossed by remnants of black stitches, grope at the rifts in her skin. 

The man covers her hands with his. “Don’t.”

For a brief moment when their eyes meet, she looks her age. Twenty-two, filled with blood and empty sorrow, holding up the world and stealing what joy she can from its cruelty. A nameless cobra poised to strike, carving its own chasms into the earth. “I’ll remember this,” she says. “I’ll know it happened, just like you did. I’ll open myself up again and again to remember if I have to. And I’ll remember it on my own terms.” She draws a thin silver blade from the sheath strapped to her ankle and presses it into the man’s palm. His fingers curl around the hilt. “With or without you.”

Arms wrap themselves around his neck, hot, jagged breath against his jaw. They are both praying to the ghosts that surround them and hold them. 

The blade saws through the thread.

**Author's Note:**

> This got really out of hand, didn't it


End file.
